On Tuesday, 13 October 2020 09:30:00 BST Jude DaShiell wrote: > I'm trying -j1 first. This machine has 50% of its maximum ram capacity > in use and only has 2gb of ram capacity so yes this is a low memory > machine. Why I'm using it at all is since it has available a 3tb hard > drive. As long as /tmp directories under the $HOME directory structure > have better system protection than /tmpfs and /var/tmp if the -j1 build > fails I'll try pointing the memory to a safer place. I need to buy some > decent sized ssd drives since that way I can do this on my new machine > with 14GB of ram.
OK, your RAM is not enough to build most large packages today. I'm thinking rust, chromium, gcc, firefox, libreoffice, as examples. Most of these will refuse to emerge right at the start as they check for adequate /var/tmp space. In any case, the solution for low RAM PCs is to set up adequate space on your disk for those packages only. Also to increase your swap, or add a swapfile just for these larger packages. Have a read at 'Example 2' here: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki//etc/portage/package.env If your / fs partition has inadequate free space, you can set up /var/tmp/ notmpfs to a different partition as long as you remember to mount it with 'mount -o exec' and activate any swapfile(s) in advance. If you only set up more swap and leave PORTAGE_TMPDIR on RAM, the swapping from your RAM to disk will inevitably incur I/O bottleneck conditions and will start thrashing the disk, which could slow everything down to a crawl, potentially for days. Therefore, it is worth switching to BFQ scheduler when heavy swappage is expected: # echo bfq > /sys/block/sda/queue/scheduler where sda is the disk on which the swapfile or partition is set.
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